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When Sam was born, I was stuck. I don’t mean that I didn’t know what to do and I had to ask someone for help, that sort of thing. No, I mean that I was physically stuck. If the doctors had had their way I would have been hooked up to blood transfusions and been literally rather than metaphorically tied, but me being me, I wasn’t. Instead, I was wobbling around the ward waiting for what seemed like an eternity to go home.

It’s a strange fact that the maternity ward, like every other hospital ward when you are feeling better, is the most boring place on the planet. There is nothing to do. Having expected to be in and out in a flash, I, like many of my similarly confined peers, had not thought to bring any entertainment with me. There were no smart phones, there was no Twitter or Facebook. There wasn’t even a telly. And anyway, if you took yourself off to the rather tatty common room to find one, there would be nothing on, and, if, by some miracle there was something a person might like to see, you could bet your life that the baby would need something, like feeding or washing or changing or something else equally important.

For me, after the drama of birth, the period post-partum was characterised by stillness. For him, for my husband, for the new daddy, it was anything but. He rushed around, fetching all the things that I hadn’t thought I would need (like shampoo and conditioner – as well as being boring, the maternity unit is the Hottest Place Ever and a nightmare for those of us with curly hair, ensuring that we have much bigger hair than we would like), and attempting to prepare the house for our return. And all this needed to be completed in the three days paternity leave he was granted (two of which was taken up by me being in labour).

For us both, the arrival of Baby Sam signalled a revolution in our circumstances. In preparation, we had given up jobs, upped sticks and moved house, started a new life entirely. From being a young, professional, DINKY couple, we catapulted ourselves into traditional roles that, on the one hand, liberated us from having to think about logistics, but on the other, put us in places where it was difficult to understand the experience of the other.

For a while we played the ‘my life is more difficult than your life’ game, especially when baby number two came along. I would long for the freedom of time alone in the car on the way to work, of conversations with adults that weren’t interrupted by screeching or disasters involving poo. He longed for the freedom of choosing what to do when, a release from the clock watching of flexi-time, the indescribable boredom of meetings that dragged on and on and ate into teatime.

By four o’clock, and the start of the most difficult couple of hours of the day (between tea time and bed time) I was longing for his return. By four o’clock, the lowest point of the sleepy pocket, he was longing to come home. Until, that is, he put his back out and was at home for a couple of weeks. Four o’clock wasn’t quite so attractive after that.

Our emotional landscapes were different too. For us both, discovering that our baby had an extra dimension meant that Anxiety entered our lives in a big way. We entered into the adventure of parenthood, as does everyone, in a state of innocent expectation that everything would be easy (apart from broken nights and nappies); something that disappeared the moment we heard the words ‘Down Syndrome’. Was he too hot? Was he too cold? What were those noises? Why had he stopped making those noises? Was he breathing? Sleep eluded us even when the baby was snoring.

But, being in sole charge of the baby, managing to keep him alive, and, even better, seeing that he grew and developed, learned, did wonders for my confidence. After the Fiasco of the Broken Leg, I returned to only extreme levels of concern when we visited playparks with the sort of equipment that encouraged Falling Off, but daddy remained on high alert. Thanks to the distance created by breadwinning, he wasn’t with him enough to calm down for some time. He still gets the jitters; worried that he’ll run off, or get lost, or find himself in the middle of some muddle or another.

I was the one who did the hospital visits, the check ups, hearing and sight tests, the overnight stays. I was the one who was delivered there, and stayed, until someone came to rescue me and take me home. I held all the information in my mind, the growth charts, the consequences of low oxygen levels at night, the development checklists; his height and weight and shoe size. I was the one who sat, enthroned upon the sofa, feeding the baby. He was the one who rushed about, bringing in the bread, backwards and forwardsing, yo-yoing between public individual and private family man, some days never even getting the chance to get out of his tie before I, desperate for a bit of peace and quiet, left him holding the baby while I walked around the block.

When Sam was born, and we found that we were dealing with a bit more than we had bargained for, we acted as one instantly. We knew that it wasn’t us that had to live with a life changing condition, he , our son, did; but thanks to our experiences we knew how to. We knew that it wasn’t so much his genes that guaranteed his life chances, as the solid, loving foundations we could give him. But the knowledge was easily buried under the pressure of day-to-day living.

It was only as we left traditional parenting behind, when I went to work and he took days off so that he could be there when they were sick, or take Sam to see the paediatrician or take a hearing test, when I had to learn to transform myself, every time I returned from my place of work, back into mummy from the moment I stepped through the door, when we walked in each other’s shoes, that we fully understood each other.

Happy Father’s Day.

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I’ve never been a huge fan of testing. My husband, who is diabetic, has to do it all the time. Several times a day he pricks holes in his fingers, checking his blood sugar levels. It’s a way of life. I’ve had my share of blood tests, but nothing in comparison to him. There have been few times in my life when I have been ruled by the phlebotomist.

Those times have been most recently characterised by fear and uncertainty, I have to admit; fear of what the results might mean. The tests never had any significance the first time round. Back then, when I was expecting baby number one, I submitted my innocent arm without a second thought. I had no idea what a ‘high risk’ verdict might be, or of how I would feel about the prospect.

After Sam was born, and Down Syndrome was diagnosed, the pair of us, daddy and mummy, came under considerable pressure to undergo all possible tests. Why wouldn’t we, after all? Why would we want to risk going through the same trauma, the same heartache, if there was a way of avoiding it?

If we could only test the chromosomal makeup of our children before they arrived then we could save ourselves an enormous amount of trouble. Couldn’t we? I mean, they’d never disappoint us by dyeing their hair, getting themselves pierced, doing badly at school, would they? They’d always stay in some sort of state of perfection, never needing glasses or hearing tests or fillings, wouldn’t they?

They’d never break their legs, or bump their heads, or develop life limiting diseases. They’d never get involved with people who don’t love them, stay out too late, or puke all over the floor because they drank too much cider. They’d like the same music we do, dress in clothes we approve of, get the right hairstyle, eat the wholemeal sandwiches and the salad, drink the water.

And then we could be sure that they’d all progress nicely through the system. They’d all travel up the Straight Line of Progress, never deviating from the norm, rubber stamped with acceptability from the moment they entered the world. They’d never need new school shoes in the half term before the end of the year. They’d never make a hole in their trousers in the first week of term. They’d do as they were told when we wanted them to and not after ten minutes of nagging.

They’d never develop that annoying little habit of having a will of their own, a different agenda. They’d never confound us by finding the strangest things interesting. Digging. Little bits of ribbon. They’d eat up the tea we had lovingly provided for them. Frankly, adult life would be an awful lot easier if no-one ever told them about the word, ‘no’.

All we’d need to do, then, is carry on with our obsessive testing and checking for normal progress. Because they all come out the same, don’t they? And we have such control over how or when they develop and what they learn, don’t we?

And when they don’t perform the way we think they should we are ready with our labels. Because if we’re giving them A, B and C and they’re not getting to D there must be something wrong with them, mustn’t there? If we stick a label on them we can categorise to our hearts’ content, check and tick off a whole new set of measures, and if they don’t live up to them we can hardly be blamed, can we?

But really, we’d rather they all stuck to the picture perfect plan for childhood. We’d rather they trotted off to school as soon as they were four, bright eyed and ready to learn, so that we could hurry back on with our own lives, pay our mortgages. We’d rather they absorbed the lessons we planned to teach them, so that then we’d be able to prove what outstanding teachers we were. And continue to pay our mortgages.

Because then we’d be able to boast about what wonderful adults we were, parents and teachers, with our perfectly sleeping babes, our children who learn to read in the prescribed way, at the prescribed time. We’d look at each other and smile in self-satisfaction at ten-out-of-tens, top-of-the-classes, exceeding all sorts of expectations. We’d be able to congratulate each other and bask in the reflected glory of our progeny.

Wouldn’t we?

This post is now part of this month’s #blogsynchproject. Thanks, @edutronic_net

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I sit here, on the sofa, listening to Sam and L having a disco in the other room, feeling an increasing sense of nervous anticipation. In less than half an hour I shall be heading out into the rain; I have my winter boots on in readiness. I’ve re-waterproofed my no longer-waterproof-and-breathable coat. The washing up is done. All I need to do is wait.

A is coming home.

He hasn’t been away for long. It’s not like he’s been on the other side of the world. He’s been away for four nights and five days with his youth group and the hole where the boy should be is gaping, hungrily waiting his return.

L has missed him. It took Sam a couple of mealtimes to realise he was gone. It’s been quiet without our little chatterbox. Minecraft has been played, but there has been no blow-by-blow account at the tea table. There have been no railways, no lights on late into the night as he devours my books, no neighbourhood boys knocking on the door, asking him out to play. Children have jumped almost instantly into their coats and shoes. There has been no shouting. No fighting. In some ways it’s been rather nice.

This is not to say that he is the family trouble maker. Not by any means. We’ve got three of those, each one equally good at running amok, creating a hurricane, if they so wish. It’s just that there is this strange effect we have noticed over the years, when one of the children is missing.

It doesn’t matter how many children you have, take one of them out of the equation, and life is suddenly in a different plane. Everything is suddenly easier.

The rule is the same for any number of children, from one upwards.

People often assume that it is Sam, or rather the Down Syndrome, that makes our life a challenging and lively one, and they are often surprised when I, more gently these days than in the past, explain that this couldn’t be any further from the truth. This last week is a prime example. Once you get over the initial strangeness of having one less plate to set at the table, one less person’s whereabouts to check (it feels a bit like there is a limb missing), the family settles into a new rhythm, it marches to a different drum.

I think it has something to do with time. There’s something about children, and having numbers of them living in your home, that fills up all available time, but not equally. It’s as if the time they take, the energy they suck out of you, is multiplied in some sort of cosmic exponential manner, with each child that arrives, squalling, into your life, your home. And, when they are not there, you are suddenly aware of its presence. I’m sitting here typing this, for a start.

And all that extra time means there is a load of parental attention going free too. And, get this: nobody has to fight for it. Instead of shoving each other out of the way, doing what they can to make sure you know they are there, they are calm. Without anybody having to say a word, they know the rules.

And I am watching my biggest and my littlest (well, I’m listening, I’m watching the computer screen and checking for spelling mistakes and making sure I haven’t repeated myself unintentionally) develop a new relationship, one that gets squeezed out of the way when the middle brother is here. As a way of making sure that neither of them were knocking around the house, bored during the holidays, I signed them up on an arts, drama, film and dance course. The pair of them are having the Best Time Ever; the shared experience is a bringer togetherer that they haven’t had before, thanks to the five years between them.

We noticed the same effect last month when the baby of the family was away at Brownie Camp. If she’d been away longer I’m pretty sure we would have seen more healing in a relationship between brothers that is stretched by the overtaking of the older one by the younger; challenged by circumstances they don’t fully understand. With no-one else to play with, they turned to each other, relaxed. Next month it will be Sam’s turn, and you can bet your bottom dollar we will forget to set the alarms and the lot of us will be late for work and school.

And now I sit, awaiting his bombastic return. Will he have grown? Will he have washed? I hope he cleaned his teeth. I’ve missed him. We’ve missed him.

We love going to Center Parcs. For my husband and me, it represents a reminder of the first real break we had from the responsibility of parenthood. For our children, it means exciting freedom, a chance to discover new things and time to play with parents who, for the duration of the stay, are released from the cares of providing breakfast, lunch, tea and doing the laundry. It also helps that it is not too far to travel from our home, as L is sick at least twice on the way there and once on the way back without fail.

For us all, there is the familiarity of several years of short breaks that brings relaxation in itself. Sam, particularly, suffers from the stress of the unknown. We have had several camping holidays and we have always returned home with a palpable sense of relief, not just because camping with children is a lot of hard work, but because Sam’s anxiety leads to sleeplessness, which in turn leads to the rest of us feeling wrecked and bad tempered. Which is kind of par for the course for families on holiday, but one would like to try to avoid it if one possibly can.

One of the things I particularly like is the break from wrestling everyone in and out of the car several times each day. Instead, as a family, we enthusiastically embrace the bicycle. Riding a bike has always been one of the key skills that we were keen for Sam to master. I was more than happy to leave this one to Daddy (having a baby around kind of gets in the way of running behind a bike), and, all credit to him, Sam was pretty much riding by the time he was six. Riding at a pace slower than walking, mind you, and more often than not, due to our familial desire to actually get to place,s attached to a tagalong, but riding nevertheless.

Unfortunately, the acquisition of such life skills has the effect of leading me into a bad case of overconfidence. Of course, go mountain biking, said I to beloved husband. I will collect the children from their activity. Sam and A can ride or push their bikes and I will take L on the seat on the back of my bike. No problem.

I didn’t reckon on the tow bar obsession rearing its ugly head, and I didn’t think that Sam would take such offence at being asked to transport himself without support. I didn’t think that he would throw his little bike down in a temper, leaving me, with a baby in a bike seat, unable to do anything to stop him, or, not having three arms, to help. What had seemed like a simple exercise rapidly spiralled out of control. I found that hills, babies, bikes, bags, boys and temper just don’t mix.

I realised (eventually) that we weren’t going anywhere fast, and, even though I was thankful that A wasn’t doing what he normally did by riding off into the sunset, full of the confidence borne of living for four years, I did what many of us do when faced with circumstances that have got way out of our hands; I prayed. Now, I don’t know what your religious convictions are, and mine aren’t the subject of this blog, but at that moment I know that I prayed the desperate kind of prayer that goes straight to the heart of God. I was filled with the instant conviction that, somehow, my, ‘Help me!’ had been heard, and that help was on its way.

Now, the funny thing about help is that I like it the way I like it, if you know what I mean. Having lived a long way from my parents and any sort of family support for the vast majority of my parenting life, I have got used to being self-reliant. So, when someone stopped me and asked if they could help my first reaction was not to fall gratefully at their feet. Instead, my experience with Sam’s tantrums led me to shake my head, firm in my belief that it would soon be over.

It took three offers of help before I cottoned on to the fact that it wasn’t coming in the form I had hoped for. All I wanted was for Sam to stop shouting and do what I wanted him to, and it took me a while to realise that wasn’t going to happen. We had struggled along together, with me alternating between encouragement and increasingly desperate begging my child to at least push his bike along if he didn’t want to ride it, until we reached the bottom of The Crazy Hill. At the top was our chalet, rest and safety, but in between there was an enormous obstacle.

As I stood at the bottom of a long, winding path that led up a steep hill, alone and responsible for three small children, one of whom was having a major rebellion, I knew, with that strange clarity that hits you in these situations that, not only was I struggling with a present problem, but I was faced with a metaphorical mountain too. That moment of clarity showed me that I might know where I was going, or more properly, I knew where I wanted to go, but that I had run out of ideas.

I knew where I wanted my lovely eldest boy to be, I knew the steps he had to take, but for the life of me, I couldn’t see how I, even with all my drive and passion, all my ingenuity and creativity, could get him there, and certainly not with a lively younger brother snapping at his heels and a baby sister permanently attached to my apron strings. I had no idea of how I was going to get from here, at the bottom, to there at the top. It wasn’t as if I was Hercules, with all the strength in the world to push that boulder up. My hands were tied.

So the third time someone stopped me and asked if I needed help I burst into tears and said, ‘Yes’. I never had myself pegged as a particularly proud person. After all, as a primary school teacher I regularly humiliate myself with fancy dress or by standing in front of grown adults reciting something ridiculous or crawling about on the floor. My piano playing in concerts has often borne a striking resemblance to Les Dawson. So why was accepting help so damned hard?

I learned that day that to accept the offer of help from someone, in this case a total stranger, did not constitute a failure on my part. It didn’t mean that I sucked as a mother and it didn’t mean that I couldn’t cope. It just meant that there are times in your life when it takes more than just one person to raise a child, and that’s OK. I can’t supply every need my children have – and neither should I have to. It’s OK to let other people play their part.

And I found out that the act of helping me, or helping Sam, blesses other people too. It’s not our thanks that does it; it’s the act of helping that gives other people pleasure and purpose. In their act of giving, they are strengthened by my weakness.

My husband tells me that I am a bit like the man in the joke who prays to be saved from drowning and refuses the rope, the lifeboat and the rubber ring because he is looking for a different kind of rescue. I’m glad that I accepted the helping hand when I did, because the stranger who helped me didn’t only see us to the top of the hill. He took us right back to our front door, and his mere presence took the wind right out of Sam’s sails. For me, that day, I was in the presence of an angel.